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I've noticed that a number of open source projects continue to use mailing lists in lieu of forums. I've personally found mailing lists to be cumbersome and unsearchable, making it harder to solve/discuss technical problems with projects employing them. Am I missing some inherit advantage to mailing lists or are they anachronistic?

Just to clarify, this isn't a "what good are mailing lists in general" question. I've just noticed that they are quite commonly used for software development projects whereas the rest of the internet seems to have moved on. So what is so good about employing mailing lists for software development?

James McMahon
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  • umm, yeah its not programming related that's why I tagged it as such. But it's directly related to software development as many projects continue to use mailing lists. – James McMahon Mar 09 '09 at 13:37
  • Anyway I would like this reopened, unfortunately because this got closed so quickly it will have zero visibility, so it will not be reopened. – James McMahon Mar 09 '09 at 13:41
  • I agree. How exactly is "communication between programmers" not programming related, but random facts about some random dude nobody ever heard about is? – Jörg W Mittag Mar 09 '09 at 14:29
  • There a ton of project management questions here on StackOverflow, and as long as we are talking about software projects, that's *definitely* on-topic. Just like there are tons of legal questions here that don't get closed or downvoted. – Jörg W Mittag Mar 09 '09 at 14:31
  • Agreed, this seems to be a valid programming related question to me. – Arnold Spence Mar 09 '09 at 18:26
  • I am surprised anyone found this question, thanks for the votes to re-open, only need one more. – James McMahon Mar 09 '09 at 19:21
  • If I could vote to re-open, I would. – Andy Mikula Mar 09 '09 at 19:22
  • They are used in programming, but so is electricity. We're not hosting questions about which solar panel is best for powering your PC either. – George Stocker Mar 09 '09 at 19:30
  • @Gortok, I think that is a bit of a strawman. Just check out the project management tag, there are alot of good questions that aren't directly about programming. – James McMahon Mar 09 '09 at 19:38
  • @nemo: If you want to talk about logical fallacies, how appealing to common practice? – GEOCHET Mar 09 '09 at 19:47
  • Why are you removing the mailing-list and project-managment tags from a question that is directly about mailing lists and project management? At least state your case. – James McMahon Mar 09 '09 at 19:56
  • "Mailing List" is like searching a question for 'text'. It doesn't make sense. Project-management does. – George Stocker Mar 09 '09 at 19:57
  • @nemo: It is not programming related. Therefore there is no reason people would want this question returned in their tag search results. – GEOCHET Mar 09 '09 at 20:11
  • @Gortok, take a look out the other questions that show up under mailing-list. I don't think this question is out of place with them. – James McMahon Mar 09 '09 at 20:22
  • Ah, I know why, because I'm not the one that removed the mailing-list tag. So don't complain to me about it. :-) – George Stocker Mar 09 '09 at 20:25
  • Not complaining, just trying to make a counter point. This one seems to be pretty controversial so I am going to make it community wiki. – James McMahon Mar 09 '09 at 21:17

4 Answers4

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Mailing lists are far better than forums if you follow multiple ones because they are push technology. If I care about N different projects, I can subscribe to N different mailing lists and have all the information in my mailbox, or I can go to N different forums that require N different logins and nearly N different interfaces.

One of the commenters suggested that with some web fora allow you to get an email notification when activity happens, and another suggested RSS feeds. To me, that's trying to re-invent a wheel that's already been invented, only you can't decide how many corners to put on it. So you're suggesting that rather than having all the conversations I'm interested delivered to my inbox where I can ignore or reply to them directly, I get an email or RSS feeder notification that there is an update, and then I can go log into all those different web fora and read or reply to them there? How is that an improvement?

Paul Tomblin
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    To play devil's advocate, a good forum system will have the benefits of push technology as well, making it easy to choose which threads you want to be notified of replies in, and which you don't. A mailing list doesn't tend to let you opt-in and opt-out on a per-thread basis. – thomasrutter Mar 09 '09 at 13:38
  • I see your point Paul, but in a world of RSS feeds, coupled with thomas' points, I don't know if I am convinced. – James McMahon Mar 09 '09 at 13:46
  • @thomas, maybe you'd rather get an email saying that somebody replied to your forum post so you can log into the forum and reply to it. Me, I'd rather get the actual reply emailed to me so I could read and reply to it right there. – Paul Tomblin Mar 09 '09 at 13:54
  • @Andy, because I changed my mind about whether it belongs here after I answered it. – Paul Tomblin Mar 09 '09 at 19:28
  • @paul: Seems to me that you should wiki your answer then. – GEOCHET Mar 09 '09 at 19:49
  • Paul I assume you have a mailbox set exclusively for mailing list material? That might be my issue. If I am using a list from work, I am limited to just my work address, which already receives a significant amount of mail without being added to a mailing list. – James McMahon Mar 10 '09 at 15:07
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    Actually, I use gmail, and I have all my mailing lists (and there are a lot of them) sent into different "labels" and not appear in the inbox. Before that, I used procmail and mail folders. Either way, I have the flexibility to deal with them when I want to deal with them. – Paul Tomblin Mar 10 '09 at 15:12
  • Well the nice thing with gmail is that you have tons of space. I don't know how you handle the throughput on a smaller mailbox. – James McMahon Mar 10 '09 at 16:08
  • When I had it stored on my home server, I was upgrading disks every few years, which grew at a faster rate than my Mail directory did. Currently I have 200Gb for /home/, and I'm only using about 50Gb of it. – Paul Tomblin Mar 10 '09 at 16:46
  • @Paul, the real problem for me lies in finding the information after it's been posted. Unless you've been keeping up with a mail list the entire time, I find, even with sites out there keep archives of mailing lists, that mailing lists are difficult to search through. – James McMahon Apr 29 '09 at 15:32
  • @nemo, maybe your experience is different, but I don't find the search functions on most web fora very easy to use either. – Paul Tomblin Apr 29 '09 at 17:16
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Now that I've seen how well SO works, I think both mailing lists and forums should close up shop and carry on under their favorite SO tag.

Arnold Spence
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  • But there are activities common to forums and mailing lists that would not fall strictly into a programming question/answer format so I guess we'll have to wait for stackoverforums.com :) – Arnold Spence Mar 10 '09 at 15:35
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Because you can follow them by checking your e-mail in the morning.

Adam Jaskiewicz
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0

It is because Most OSS developers have configured their mail workflow to be very efficiently.

I could imagine other solutions as well (including pull techniques like RSS), and most of them are used somewhere. But e-Mail is still the common denominator.

Note that one often finds interfaces to RSS, to the Web, to bug tracking systems, and to web services.

Prestel Nué
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